Amy Gehrt: GOP finger-pointing aimed in wrong direction

It turns out the Republican Party is right: there have been attempts to engage in voter fraud this election cycle. The problem for the GOP, however, is that the firm in question has been working on behalf of Republicans, not the liberal-leaning groups the GOP has sought to blame.

It turns out the Republican Party is right: there have been attempts to engage in voter fraud this election cycle. The problem for the GOP, however, is that the firm in question has been working on behalf of Republicans, not the liberal-leaning groups the GOP has sought to blame.

Palm Beach County elections officials reported last week they had discovered 106 potentially fraudulent registration forms. All had been submitted by Strategic Allied Consulting (SAC), a Virginia-based company hired by the Florida Republican Party.

SAC and its founder, Nathan Sproul, a conservative political consultant in Arizona, have attempted to spin the scandal, blaming a single employee in Palm Beach County for the suspicious forms. That’s not true, however. According to a letter U.S. Rep. Ted Deutch, D-Boca Raton, sent to Florida Gov. Rick Scott, “ten [sic] additional counties across the state have also reported suspicious voter registration and change of address forms associated with Strategic Allied Consulting.”

Republican Paul Lux, the supervisor of elections in Okaloosa County, told the Los Angeles Times that among the discrepancies were fake addresses and phony signatures. In addition, “A number of dead people were trying to register to vote,” he noted.

SAC’s work isn’t confined to Florida, either. At the urging of the Republican National Committee, party leaders in seven swing states hired the firm to provide voter registration services — reportedly at a cost of at least $3.1 million.

The Florida Republican Party and the RNC have since severed ties with SAC, saying they have “zero tolerance” for voter fraud, but that denial rings hollow. Other companies Sproul has run in the past have been accused of similar misdeeds aimed at helping the Republican Party, including suppressing Democratic voter turnout, manipulating ballot initiatives and throwing out Democrats’ registration forms.

In fact, Sproul, a former executive director of the Arizona Republican Party, told the Los Angeles Times that the RNC actually asked him to set up a new company in order to shield itself from being publicly linked to the previous allegations. SAC was formed in June, shortly after a five-month stint Sproul spent working for the Romney campaign.

In light of all of this, it seems strange that the GOP would make election fraud such an issue. The only other high-profile voter-registration scandal I can remember in recent years involved the liberal-leaning community organizing group known as ACORN in 2008. At that time, Republicans jumped all over the organization and its claims the problems were the result of a few bad apples.

But as then-Rep. Chris Cannon, a Utah Republican, pointed out during a congressional hearing on voter suppression, “The difference between ACORN and Sproul is that ACORN doesn’t throw away or change registration documents after they have been filled out.”

The other difference is that Sproul’s groups weren’t the ones to alert authorities to the potential problem caused by their workers.

Page 2 of 2 - Still, despite both voter-registration scandals, in-person voter fraud is quite uncommon. According to a study conducted by the non-partisan Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, “There have been a handful of substantiated cases of individual ineligible voters attempting to defraud the election system. But by any measure, voter fraud is extraordinarily rare.

“In part, this is because fraud by individual voters is a singularly foolish and ineffective way to attempt to win an election. Each act of voter fraud in connection with a federal election risks five years in prison and a $10,000 fine, in addition to any state penalties. In return, it yields at most one incremental vote. That single extra vote is simply not worth the price.”

So if the threat of someone actually casting a fraudulent ballot is exceedingly small, and the GOP has no problem with repeatedly employing a voter-registration vendor with a long history of the same shady practices they say they are seeking to prevent, what exactly is the point of all this mock outrage?

If the critics are correct and the efforts supposedly designed to curb voter fraud ­— such as requiring voters to show photo identification — are really about disenfranchising poor and elderly voters (who are less likely to have driver’s licenses, and more likely to cast ballots for Democrats), then perhaps this is merely a two-prong approach to preventing the pesky 47 percent of Americans Romney so readily dismisses from making their voices heard on Election Day. If not, it might be time for the Republican Party to stop all of the finger-pointing ... unless those fingers are directed at themselves.

Amy Gehrt may be reached at agehrt@pekintimes.com. The views expressed in this column are not necessarily those of the newspaper.